It’s difficult for us to imagine what our mental lives would be like without language. Some theorists have even gone so far as to argue that language and logical thought are one and the same thing. A new brain imaging study challenges this notion by showing that logical inferences based on simple “not”, “or”, “if”, “then” terms activate a separate, though overlapping, network of brain regions compared with logical inferences based on grammatical judgements.

Martin Monti and colleagues scanned the brains of fifteen participants while they judged the accuracy of conclusions flowing from two kinds of logical argument. One kind was a more pure form of logic, such as “If both X and Z then not Y”, whilst the other kind was based on grammatical rules, such as “It was X that Y saw Z take”. The two types of inference were intended to be of comparable difficulty and to be equally valid (or invalid) but crucially only the grammatical version involved the interpretation of language-related roles such as “object” and “subject”.

As expected, inferences drawn from the grammar-based logic activated a swathe of brain regions usually associated with language functioning, including the Wernicke-Broca circuit, as well as other regions associated with working memory and executive functioning. Judgements about the purer logical arguments also activated regions associated with memory and mental effort, but did not activate the core language areas of the brain. Instead, the grammar-free logical problems triggered activity in prefrontal regions previously associated with logical reasoning.

Monti’s team said their findings were hard to reconcile “with the claim that language and logic are a unitary phenomenon”. Rather, they argued their results are consistent with language and logic being separate processes. The grammar-based statements appeared to be solvable using language networks of the brain, whilst purer logic was dealt with by a distinct neural network not dependent on language. The researchers concluded that their work supports earlier findings by others. For example, it’s been shown that it is possible to have numerical concepts without the words for those concepts . The new and old findings together show that “much of thought is not embedded in language”, they said._________________________________

Monti MM, Parsons LM, & Osherson DN (2009). The boundaries of language and thought in deductive inference. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 19617569

Does language influence the way we think? The question of linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity has challenged philosophers for years. In 1820 Wilhelm von Humboldt proposed that language is the very fabric of thought, which means that thoughts are produced as a kind of inner dialog using the same grammar as the thinker’s native language. Hence: “The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world”. Ludwig Wittgenstein stated that the boundaries of one’s language are the boundaries of one’s world. Finally, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis electrified the scientific scene, claiming that linguistic structure influences the cognition of language users. Language classifies the world around us into concepts in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.Sounds interesting? Read on here: http://between-us-bilinguals.webs.com/